A fake genocide meets a real one
For more than a year, Jews inside and outside the State of Israel have been besieged by false claims of the “genocide” of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
A screengrab from a “Voice of America” report on those who have fled Sudan for refugee camps in Chad as part of an ongoing civil war, May 16, 2023. Credit: Henry Wilkins/VOA via Wikimedia Commons.
The rhetoric of the pro-Hamas mob—“We don’t want no Zionists here,” “Go back to Poland” and so on—has been ugly enough to make Nazi Germany proud. The real-world impact—arson and gun attacks on synagogues and other Jewish institutions from Canada to Australia, a pogrom in Amsterdam, physical and sexual assaults on those wearing identifiably Jewish symbols, creeping discrimination against “Zionists” in the worlds of art and medicine and academia, and too many other such episodes to comprehensively list here—is all too reminiscent of Nazi thuggery.
There is no longer any doubt that Jewish communities are facing the worst upsurge of antisemitism since World War II. At the root of the current onslaught is what my JNS colleague Melanie Phillips calls “Palestinianism,” which, she argues, “seeks to write the Jews out of their country, their history and the world.” That explains the fixation with affixing the label “genocide” to Israel’s military response to the atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, which were themselves an act of genocide, intentionally targeting Jews because they are Jews living in their historic homeland. Yet in public relations terms, we have to concede that this has been a blood libel with legs, embraced not just by the keffiyeh-clad automatons but by governments from Ireland to South Africa, as well as by the United Nations, whose secretary-general, António Guterres, opined last September to his eternal shame that he had “never seen such a level of death and destruction as we are seeing in Gaza in the last few months.”
It’s important to recognize that the trauma Jews have experienced since Oct. 7 has also impacted non-Jews. I don’t mean our immediate neighbors in Europe and North America who, apart from a courageous and vocal minority, have followed in the ignoble tradition of their forebears by looking the other way. I am referring to those minorities and stateless nations around the world whose fate at the hands of repressive regimes and their proxy militias has been drowned out by the noise of the pro-Hamas mob and its enablers. Silence and indifference have greeted the Turkish regime’s bloodthirsty pledge to “eliminate” the Kurdish-led, U.S.-backed resistance forces in Syria in the wake of the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s vile dictatorship. The same U.N. Human Rights Council that lambastes Israel last month co-hosted a “human rights” conference with the same Chinese Communist Party that is waging a genocide in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.
It’s the ongoing slaughter in Sudan, however, that really exposes the moral rot at the heart of “Palestinianism.” For the first time since the term “genocide” was given legal standing with the 1948 adoption of the U.N. Genocide Convention, the world’s attention has been gripped by a fake genocide while a real one has been raging at the same time. Hamas propaganda preying on the minds of the stupid and the gullible in our own societies is largely to thank for this sordid outcome, which leaves an indelible stain on Western civilization.
Since the outbreak of Sudan’s latest civil war in 2023, the Biden administration has placed the issue at the bottom of its foreign-policy pile. But one of the last acts of outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken was to issue a Jan. 7 statement concluding that “members of the RSF and allied militias have committed genocide in Sudan.” Too little, too late, certainly, but not wholly useless.
The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are an outgrowth of the feared Janjaweed paramilitaries that carried out a genocide in the western region of Darfur 20 years ago. The latest fighting followed the decision of RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as “Hemedti,” to split with the military government that took power in a 2021 coup in Khartoum. As Blinken correctly pointed out, both the military regime and the RSF “bear responsibility for the violence and suffering in Sudan and lack the legitimacy to govern a future peaceful Sudan.” But the RSF and its allies have, to quote Blinken again, “systematically murdered men and boys, even infants, on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence.”
The overall humanitarian cost is staggering. More than 11 million human beings have been internally displaced, and another 3.1 million have fled across Sudan’s borders—about 30% of the country’s population. Nearly 640,000 are suffering from one of the worst famines in Sudan’s history. More than 30 million people are in dire need of humanitarian assistance. The number of dead lies in the tens of thousands. The number of demonstrations, rallies and performative protests stands at zero.
Included in the raft of sanctions that accompanied Blinken’s announcement are seven companies based in the United Arab Emirates—a U.S. ally and partner in the broader Middle East peace process—that have helped the RSF purchase weapons and smuggle gold from Sudan’s lucrative mines through Dubai. The UAE operates an embassy and three consulates here in the United States, whose addresses are easily available with a quick online search. A demonstration outside one of these, under the slogan “UAE: Stop Funding Genocide in Sudan,” would be perfectly feasible and eminently laudable. But those organizations that might be in the position to organize one—like Black Lives Matter, a sentiment that clearly doesn’t apply to Black Lives in Africa when Arabs are doing the killing—are absent.
This brings me back to the point I made earlier about the impact of this present surge of antisemitism. I’ve never been a fan of the oft-made assertion that Jews are the canary in the coal mine and that what starts with them won’t end there, because it assumes a much greater degree of overlap between antisemitism and other forms of bigotry than is actually the case.
However, a more salient point is that the obsession with Jews and Israel diverts column inches and airtime away from those humanitarian crises that are far more dire than Gaza and far more intractable, given that the war in the Strip would be over as soon as Hamas releases the remaining hostages it kidnapped on Oct. 7 and lays down its weapons, as growing numbers of Palestinians—as distinct from their Western cheerleaders—are exhaustedly urging.
As long as the outside world continues to indulge the Palestinian strategy of being the only victims worth the name, we are abetting the genocides that don’t get talked about.
